Changes in industrial leadership and catch-up by latecomers in shipbuilding industry

This study considers the shipbuilding industry to explain the successive changes in leadershipfrom the Schumpeterian perspective. The window of opportunity for Japan to forge ahead ofthe UK was the arrival and employment of new technologies, a method referred to aswelding block. The Japanese firms also adopted path-creation, a strategy that involves theuse of innovations more promptly than the incumbent UK, which had delayed adoption dueto the opposition of labour unions. The leadership shift from Japan to Korea also representspath-creation given that Korean firms responded quickly to the rise of a new window ofopportunity (i.e. systematised 3D computer-aided design technologies) and met the newlyrising demand in large vessels that was the second window of opportunity. Both of thesecases of path-creation are an adoption and follow-on innovation mode because thelatecomers not only adopted new technologies, but also reinvented them further into a newsystem of production. This study also finds the unique, institutional nature of the source ofthe incumbent trap in the shipbuilding industry, which is different from that associated withthe relative costs and benefits of new versus old technologies. In addition, this studyidentifies the peculiarity of the technological regimes of the shipbuilding sector and theassociated unique nature of the technological window of opportunity, which are not merelycompetence-destroying innovations of component technologies but a consolidation of a newsystematised technology that has changed the entire process of shipbuilding.